Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . Since sugar had to pass through many hands before it reached the fairs, it was expensive and hard to get. King Henry III of England, for example, liked sugar. Yet there was little he could do to satisfy his craving. He wrote to one official in 1226 asking if he could possibly obtain three pounds of the precious substance—at a cost of about 450 modern dollars. He later appealed to a mayor, hoping he might be able to get four more pounds of the rare grains. And finally, by 1243, he managed to buy three hundred pounds. The fairs lasted until the 1300s, when Venice came to dominate European trade with the Muslim world. The Venetians greatly expanded the sugar trade, so much so that a hundred years after Henry III's reign, the English were able to buy thousands of pounds of the sweet stuff each year. Which inference does this passage support?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . In the 1400s, Spain and Portugal were competing to explore down the coast of Africa and find a sea route to Asia. That way, they could have the prized Asian spices they wanted without having to pay high prices to Venetian and Muslim middlemen. Spanish and Portuguese sailors searching for that sea route conquered the Canary Islands and the Azores. Soon they began building Muslim-style sugar plantations on the islands, some of them staffed by slaves purchased from nearby Africa. One sailor came to know these islands particularly well because he traded in "white gold"—sugar. And then, as he set off on his second voyage across the sea to what he thought was Asia, he carried sugar cane plants from Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, with him on his ship. His name was Christopher Columbus. How do the details in the passage most support the central idea?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . Slave labor was valuable because it produced cheap sugar that everyone wanted to buy. But if people stopped buying that sugar, the whole slave system would collapse. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the women of New England refused to buy English products and English tea. The loss of income made London rescind some of the taxes it had imposed on America. Now this same tactic—boycotting—was used to fight slavery. Some 400,000 English people stopped buying the sugar that slaves grew and harvested. Instead, they bought loaves of sugar that carried a label that said, "Produced by the labor of FREEMEN"—the sugar came from India. When the English looked at the sugar they used every day, Clarkson and the other abolitionists made them see the blood of the slaves who had created it. The very fact that slave-made sugar was so popular made it harder for the English to ignore the reality of slavery. Sugar was a bridge—like the sneakers and T-shirts and rugs that, today, we know are made by sweatshop labor. If you wanted the product, abolitionists forced you to think about how it was made. Slavery—a practice as ancient as human civilization—was becoming unacceptable, a form of inhumanity people could no longer tolerate. Which sentence best states the authors' claim in this passage?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . The enslaved people on Saint Domingue were not merely fighting against the terrible conditions on the island. They were fighting for principles that they had learned from Europeans and Americans—from people similar to their own slave masters. The trio of great principles behind the French Revolution that began in 1789 consisted of "liberty, equality, fraternity" (brotherhood). As boats arrived in Saint Domingue from France, slaves learned that a revolution was going on in the name of human rights. Already, they'd been given a taste of great change because of a revolution closer to home. In 1779, a regiment of free blacks from Saint Domingue went to America to join in the fight for independence. They brought home with them the idea that "all men are created equal." Two years after the meeting in Alligator Woods, on August 29, 1793, the leading French official on Saint Domingue realized that there was no point in opposing Toussaint and his armies. The slaves had freed themselves. And the following February, Paris agreed. The ideal of brotherhood announced by the revolutionaries of Paris finally included the sugar workers of Saint Domingue. Which details do the authors include to support the claim in this passage? Choose two correct answers.
Which excerpt is an example of situational irony in Saki’s "The Storyteller”?
Read the excerpt from "The Storyteller." The smaller girl created a diversion by beginning to recite "On the Road to Mandalay.” She only knew the first line, but she put her limited knowledge to the fullest possible use. She repeated the line over and over again in a dreamy but resolute and very audible voice; it seemed to the bachelor as though some one had had a bet with her that she could not repeat the line aloud two thousand times without stopping. Whoever it was who had made the wager was likely to lose his bet. "Come over here and listen to a story,” said the aunt, when the bachelor had looked twice at her and once at the communication cord. The children moved listlessly towards the aunt’s end of the carriage. Evidently her reputation as a storyteller did not rank high in their estimation. In a low, confidential voice, interrupted at frequent intervals by loud, petulant questionings from her listeners, she began an unenterprising and deplorably uninteresting story about a little girl who was good, and made friends with every one on account of her goodness, and was finally saved from a mad bull by a number of rescuers who admired her moral character. Which instances of situational irony occur in the passage? Choose two correct answers.
Read the excerpt from Persepolis . Open image in full-screen view Which details best help develop the central idea of the panels? Choose three correct answers.
Which quotation from a Shakespearean sonnet is a couplet?
Study the cartoon More Beaches Reported with Unhealthy Contaminants by Don Landgren Jr. Open image in full-screen view © Don Landgren – USA TODAY NETWORK. How does the cartoonist use an analogy to express his viewpoint in this cartoon?
Study the cartoon by James Silk. Open image in full-screen view How do the ice floe and the text create meaning?
Read the excerpt from Persepolis . Open image in full-screen view Which elements does the author use most to develop the central idea of these panels?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. Some of the enslaved took the next step. Running away from the sugar plantations, or attacking them in force, was another kind of statement. When the enslaved Africans could not stand their lives anymore, they risked everything to run or to fight. There was just one way for the owners to silence their workers: by making the price of flight or rebellion too high. Spreading terror was the job of the overseer. How does the author’s use of the word silence affect the tone?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. A stream of pale ash-colored syrup gushed out from the mills, bubbling white with foam. The liquid rushed down a wooden gutter directly into the boiling house, a building of massive furnaces and cauldrons, where the syrup was heated and strained and turned into crystals. A giant copper kettle—often about four feet across and three feet deep—waited for the pale river. This was the first in a series of ever-smaller cauldrons, and beneath each gaped what the Brazilians called the "great open mouths"—the huge furnaces that had to be constantly filled with the wood that workers had chopped down and hauled to be ready for this moment. The boiling house was as perilous as the mills, for if a person nodded off for a second, he or she could slip into a bubbling vat. Mammoth fires burned in the "mouths," clouds of steam billowed above the kettles, and the heat was so intense that the boiling houses had to be sprayed with water so they would not go up in flames. Then there was the smell, or rather, the stench of the boiling liquid. As the [sugar cane] juice boiled, a foul scum rose to the top—which a slave had to keep skimming off with a long-handled ladle. Over and over again the liquid had to be strained and purified, even as it kept boiling, boiling, boiling in the copper vats. Which text evidence best supports the authors' claim that sugar processing was a long and difficult process?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . The diamond and the house: two family treasures, two parts of the story of sugar. We realized that our two family stories—Marina's great grandparents, brought to Guyana to replace slaves, and Marc's aunt's grandfather, helping to refine an alternative to that same sugar—were just the beginning of a much larger story about a remarkable substance. It is a story of the movement of millions of people, of fortunes made and lost, of brutality and delight—all because of tiny crystals stirred into our coffee, twirled on top of a cake. Sugar, we began to see, changed the world. What is the purpose of this passage?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . The seeds for this system were sown in 1823 in the sugar colony of British Guiana—now Guyana—where John Gladstone, father of the future British prime minister William Gladstone, owned over a thousand slaves. John Smith, a young and idealistic English preacher who had recently come to the area, was becoming popular with those slaves. His inspiring sermons retold the story of Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt and to freedom. The sugar workers listened and understood: Smith was speaking not about the Bible, but about the present. That summer, after hearing one of Smith’s sermons, over three thousand slaves grabbed their machetes, their long poles, and rose up against their masters. The governor of the colony rushed toward the burning plantations, where he met a group of armed slaves, and asked them what they wanted. "Our rights," came the reply. Here was Haiti—and for that matter America and France—all over again. The slaves insisted they were not property; like the Jews in Egypt, they were God's children, who were owed their basic human rights. The evidence of enslaved people’s revolt and fight for freedom is
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . Then Gandhi invited each person in the theater to join him in an exceptional oath, a pledge not to register, not to accept the government's rules, even if that resulted in severe punishment. Gandhi insisted that every person weigh the commitment and make a personal choice. "Every individual," he explained, must make the oath him- or herself, facing not to his neighbor, but his God. Nor should it be taken in order to gain power over anybody but oneself, for the power of an oath is defined by what one man can promise to do, and what he is willing to suffer: insult, incarceration, hard labor, flogging, fine, deportation, and even death. Everyone in the audience raised his or her hand. Gandhi bound the crowd together to follow a new path, which he called Satyagraha—which means "truth with force," or "firmness." It is also called "love-force." While the goal of violence is to defeat and vanquish the enemy, the goal of Satyagraha is to convince or convert the opponent. "He must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy." A person who believes in Satyagraha will not fight physically, but instead resists through his or her own inner courage, knowing he might be jailed or beaten. Which statement best describes the authors’ purpose in this passage?
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